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The best hour of television I saw this year aired on a Sunday night, but it wasn’t True Detective or The Walking Dead. It was “Iron City” episode 406 of the Showtime dramedy Shameless that featured an Emmy-caliber performance from Emmy Rossum. (Spoilers ahead for season four of Shameless)

Shameless is the story of the Gallagher family, living in Chicagoland just above the poverty line, headed by Frank, a charming but hopeless drunk, played by Macy. Rossum plays Fiona, the resourceful and capable oldest daughter who's that rare combination of a sexy 21-year old high-school dropout who alternates between cocktail waitress and sewage worker while running an unlicensed daycare center in her living room on the side. Smart, funny, and sad all at once, Fiona was truly a force of nature.

Until this year. She lands a real job, whereupon she begins dating the boss (Mike) and promptly begins cheating on him with his drug addict brother, Robby. A mess morphs something worse when Fiona’s three-year old-brother Liam gets into the cocaine that Robby left at her house, and she ends up behind bars.

Hardly an hour goes by on television where you don’t see someone arrested, but "Iron City" will make you think about that in a whole different way. And the rest of Fiona's arc this season has been every bit as moving.

I talked to Rossum about Fiona’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, the safety net in modern America and during the filming of "Iron City" that was so tough she couldn’t drive herself home.

(This is the first of a week-long string of interviews. Look out for talks with Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks, Justified showrunner Graham Yost, and Scott Gimple, showrunner of The Walking Dead, as well as a video interview with Michael Potts of True Detective.)

Fiona’s having kind of a tough season…

It was exhausting. I kept thinking everybody’s is going to hate me. And they do. And that’s okay. Because I feel like Fiona has fostered enough good will that she can mess up pretty bad and come back from it. It’s interesting how you can build a character up over seasons and then kind of pull the rug out from under them. And have them try to stand back up.

I heard that people have come up and said very rude things to you —like “coke whore” …

Right.

…but personally I feel terrible for Fiona.

I’m so glad. Thank you. Honestly. It feels good to hear that somebody has empathy for her. I feel that Episode 410 is going to change your mind., but …

I’ve seen that episode and it didn’t change my mind.

She’s having a really tough go of it. She’s someone who’s held the family together for this long and it’s legitimate that she would come undone in a certain way.

It was definitely difficult to play, because I had to find the legitimacy to that. I had to really ground it. Find complexity within that. Not just make her a hot mess for hot mess’s sake.